idealistic mission<\/a> \u201cto empower communities, reduce environmental impact, and drive economic growth,\u201d they claim the only thing they ever got from Mpela was a harsh lesson on the art of the con.<\/p>\n\u201cSome [students] relocated across the country, others turned down paying jobs and research positions to do the work,\u201d according to court papers filed in Brooklyn Federal Court. <\/p>\n
\u201cNone of them have ever been paid a single dollar.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mpela is accused of taking advantage of idealistic young students despite not having the cash to pay them. Cypress Hills LDC\/Instagram<\/p>\n
Mpela collectively owes the group around $950,000 in unpaid wages, according to their lawyer.<\/p>\n
Geovanni Luti, a 4.0 student\u00a0from Howard, said he turned down a lucrative offer at Collins Aerospace to work for Mpela and moved from Texas to a rat infested Bronx apartment for the job.<\/p>\n
\u201cI genuinely thought I\u2019d be making a change, and I genuinely thought he was a man of vision who wanted to make an impact on the community by taking people from our community to do that,\u201d Luti told the Post.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Liu, who helped organize the class-action suit, said, \u201cIt makes me feel like my interest in serving others was just weaponized for someone else\u2019s gain.\u201d Stephen Yang for NY Post<\/p>\n
Turns out, Luti said, he actually worked on grant proposals to fund Mpela\u2019s not-so-bright idea to \u201cmanufacture EV chargers\u201d in the basement of Transit Tech High School.<\/p>\n
\u201cI found [that] to be extremely dangerous and unethical, especially since he wanted the Transit Tech students \u2014 because they\u2019re at a technical school \u2014 to work on manufacturing them and then sell it to the market,\u201d Luti said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is infrastructure that can kill people, and I had nobody supervising me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mpela, when asked about the allegedly owed money, reputedly blamed delays on a New York state grant. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis ends now,\u201d Marcial said. Stephen Yang for NY Post<\/p>\n
The plaintiffs\u2019 lawyers called the excuse a blatant lie, claiming that grant couldn\u2019t have even gone toward owed wages.<\/p>\n
Mpela gave The Post similar excuses over the alleged missing wages \u2014 while insisting he only owes $53,000 to the students.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe mistake I made was to hire the 2026 team without getting a confirmation from one of the potential fiscal sponsors,\u201d Mpela said in an email.<\/p>\n
Mpela said he apologized and stopped the most recent work in July, months after signing contracts with the students.<\/p>\n
He is being sued over the past two summers\u2019 worth of supposed projects.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt certainly makes me feel deceived,\u201d said CUNY graduate student Julie Liu, 26, who was promised $27 an hour as a supervisor last summer and helped lead the class-action suit.<\/p>\n
Nalane Green Solutions\u2019 stated mission is introducing high-school kids to real-world applications of clean tech and energy. Cypress Hills LDC\/Instagram<\/p>\n
\u201cIt makes me feel like my interest in serving others was just weaponized for someone else\u2019s gain.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most of the students learned about Mpela\u2019s company Nalane through their school\u2019s career offices, with Liu telling The Post that the first round of interviews took place in the engineering school\u2019s dean\u2019s office.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe trusted this start-up company, even though we\u2019ve never heard of it before, because we trusted our administrators at City College,\u201d she said in an interview, adding that the 32 students from the engineering school were each owed thousands in unpaid wages.<\/p>\n
The plaintiffs\u2019 lawyer, Chaya Gourarie, partner at the Bell law Group, told The Post, \u201cWe intend to hold Moe fully accountable.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese students deserve to be heard. Their case sends a clear message: every worker who is wrongfully denied their wages has a voice.\u201d<\/p>\n
CUNY, which is not accused of any wrongdoing in the suit, said it is working to support its impacted students but declined to comment further.<\/p>\n
Mpela admits to not having funding when confronted about not paying student workers this spring on video. Bell Law Group<\/p>\n
But the school did investigate the claims against Mpela when students raised their wage issue \u2014 and banned Nalane from the CUNY recruiting systems.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe cannot support the unethical behavior and illegal behavior of this employer,\u201d Career Director Katie Nailler wrote in an email filed in federal court.<\/p>\n
Even after the CUNY students jilted in 2025 first sued in April, Mpela proceeded to recruit for his second rip-off summer \u2014 this time from Howard University, court documents allege.<\/p>\n
Howard did not respond to a Post request for comment.<\/p>\n
Neither Mpela nor city officials responded to questions about the alleged EV proposal at Transit Tech.<\/p>\n
Another Howard student from this past summer, Alana Marcial, 20, said she never got paid for any of the 636 hours she worked for Mpela, turning down two other job offers after buying into his message of serving the community.<\/p>\n
\u201cHonestly, I feel exploited,\u201d Marcial said. \u201cFor us to be presented with the initiative to do good in our community\u2026 it\u2019s gut\u2011wrenching.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a video of a meeting shared with The Post, Mpela, when confronted by pissed-off student workers, admitted that he hired this summer\u2019s students despite knowing he had no money to pay them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
City records show Nalane Green Solutions received a $25,000 contract through the city\u2019s education department last year but has only spent $1,700 so far this July.\u00a0The DOE did not respond to a Post request for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis ends now,\u201d Marcial said. \u201cYou\u2019re not gonna live in delusion anymore\u2026. Now you\u2019re not gonna hurt any other students anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A green-job grifter recruited dozens of standout college students for summer work at his start-up, then stiffed them…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1005177,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,39799,5623,820,19300,336,5248,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,23988,67,586,132,5230,68,1154,2969],"class_list":["post-1005176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-america","tag-brooklyn-federal-court","tag-east-new-york","tag-fraud","tag-green-energy","tag-lawsuits","tag-metro","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-scams","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-us-news","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117107294577408148","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1005176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1005177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1005176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1005176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1005176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}